Are you a clean eater?

Naughty but nice

I’m not. And I’m not falling for it either. Yes, processed foods are not going to do you any favours and it’s best to avoid the hit of carbs from fast absorbed carb sources like refined flour when you’ve got pounds to shift, but does that mean we should think about food as clean or dirty?

Diets only work by limiting the amount you eat. It’s not rocket science. And they use some kind of rule to help you to stick to them. It might be ‘only eat cabbage soup’, ‘only eat fat’, or ‘only eat things that were available in Palaeolithic times’. And despite what their authors earnestly try to explain, the nutritional merits of any of these rules are actually besides the point. What matters is that if you follow the rule, you limit the amount of total calories you eat. There is only so much cabbage soup you can eat.

It’s the cutting out that counts.

And it’s how they make those rules that determine how successful the diet is. Strict rules are good, as far as they go. The stricter they are the more weight you lose. For a while. We all know what happens then. And once we’ve broken them we don’t put them back together. Your Amy Brain doesn’t work like that.

The Diet Groove works on a very simple rhythm that allows you lots of freedom and stops any rules from feeling too strict. And because it’s flexible it’s actually quite hard to break. It bends rather than snaps.

But this ‘clean-eating’ thing takes a slightly different approach. Yes, it has its rules. And basically it’s a low carb diet. But it’s the name that puts me off. I love all good food: from a squeaky clean bean to a dirty great rack of sticky ribs. I love fatty pork belly and muddy chocolate pudding. And I’m not going to have it divided into clean and dirty.

People struggle enough with feelings of guilt about what they eat without attaching the idea that we’re doing something ‘dirty’. There’s a place for everything in our diets without putting extra emphasis on the ‘forbidden fruit’ of dirty foods.

And will it really do any good to hype the appeal of something by labelling it as wrong? Won’t that only make us want them more? That’s how Amy Brain works. After all, they used to sell cream cakes on the basis that they were ‘Naughty’. But nice.